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New Linux Rootkit - Schneier on Security
Interesting: The company has released a working rootkit called “Curing” that uses io_uring, a feature built into the Linux kernel, to stealthily perform malicious activities without being caught by many of the detection solutions currently on the market. At the heart of the issue is the heavy reliance on monitoring system calls, which has become the go-to method for many cybersecurity vendors. The problem? Attackers can completely sidestep these monitored calls by leaning on io_uring instead. This clever method could let bad actors quietly make network connections or tamper with files without triggering the usual alarms...
Regulating AI Behavior with a Hypervisor - Schneier on Security
Interesting research: “Guillotine: Hypervisors for Isolating Malicious AIs.” Abstract:As AI models become more embedded in critical sectors like finance, healthcare, and the military, their inscrutable behavior poses ever-greater risks to society. To mitigate this risk, we propose Guillotine, a hypervisor architecture for sandboxing powerful AI models—models that, by accident or malice, can generate existential threats to humanity. Although Guillotine borrows some well-known virtualization techniques, Guillotine must also introduce fundamentally new isolation mechanisms to handle the unique threat model posed by existential-risk AIs. For example, a rogue AI may try to introspect upon hypervisor software or the underlying hardware substrate to enable later subversion of that control plane; thus, a Guillotine hypervisor requires careful co-design of the hypervisor software and the CPUs, RAM, NIC, and storage devices that support the hypervisor software, to thwart side channel leakage and more generally eliminate mechanisms for AI to exploit reflection-based vulnerabilities. Beyond such isolation at the software, network, and microarchitectural layers, a Guillotine hypervisor must also provide physical fail-safes more commonly associated with nuclear power plants, avionic platforms, and other types of mission critical systems. Physical fail-safes, e.g., involving electromechanical disconnection of network cables, or the flooding of a datacenter which holds a rogue AI, provide defense in depth if software, network, and microarchitectural isolation is compromised and a rogue AI must be temporarily shut down or permanently destroyed. ...
Age Verification Using Facial Scans - Schneier on Security
Discord is testing the feature: “We’re currently running tests in select regions to age-gate access to certain spaces or user settings,” a spokesperson for Discord said in a statement. “The information shared to power the age verification method is only used for the one-time age verification process and is not stored by Discord or our vendor. For Face Scan, the solution our vendor uses operates on-device, which means there is no collection of any biometric information when you scan your face. For ID verification, the scan of your ID is deleted upon verification.”...
CVE Program Almost Unfunded - Schneier on Security
Mitre’s CVE’s program—which provides common naming and other informational resources about cybersecurity vulnerabilities—was about to be cancelled, as the US Department of Homeland Security failed to renew the contact. It was funded for eleven more months at the last minute. This is a big deal. The CVE program is one of those pieces of common infrastructure that everyone benefits from. Losing it will bring us back to a world where there’s no single way to talk about vulnerabilities. It’s kind of crazy to think that the US government might damage its own security in this way—but I suppose no crazier than any of the other ways the US is working against its own interests right now...
China Sort of Admits to Being Behind Volt Typhoon - Schneier on Security
The Wall Street Journal has the story: Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the two superpowers are continuing to escalate. The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan, the people, who declined to be named, said. The admission wasn’t explicit:...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid and Efficient Solar Tech - Schneier on Security
Researchers are trying to use squid color-changing biochemistry for solar tech. This appears to be new and related research to a 2019 squid post. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
AI Vulnerability Finding - Schneier on Security
Microsoft is reporting that its AI systems are able to find new vulnerabilities in source code: Microsoft discovered eleven vulnerabilities in GRUB2, including integer and buffer overflows in filesystem parsers, command flaws, and a side-channel in cryptographic comparison. Additionally, 9 buffer overflows in parsing SquashFS, EXT4, CramFS, JFFS2, and symlinks were discovered in U-Boot and Barebox, which require physical access to exploit. The newly discovered flaws impact devices relying on UEFI Secure Boot, and if the right conditions are met, attackers can bypass security protections to execute arbitrary code on the device...
Reimagining Democracy - Schneier on Security
Imagine that all of us—all of society—have landed on some alien planet and need to form a government: clean slate. We do not have any legacy systems from the United States or any other country. We do not have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking. How would we govern ourselves? It is unlikely that we would use the systems we have today. Modern representative democracy was the best form of government that eighteenth-century technology could invent. The twenty-first century is very different: scientifically, technically, and philosophically. For example, eighteenth-century democracy was designed under the assumption that travel and communications were both hard...
Arguing Against CALEA - Schneier on Security
At a Congressional hearing earlier this week, Matt Blaze made the point that CALEA, the 1994 law that forces telecoms to make phone calls wiretappable, is outdated in today’s threat environment and should be rethought: In other words, while the legally-mandated CALEA capability requirements have changed little over the last three decades, the infrastructure that must implement and protect it has changed radically. This has greatly expanded the “attack surface” that must be defended to prevent unauthorized wiretaps, especially at scale. The job of the illegal eavesdropper has gotten significantly easier, with many more options and opportunities for them to exploit. Compromising our telecommunications infrastructure is now little different from performing any other kind of computer intrusion or data breach, a well-known and endemic cybersecurity problem. To put it bluntly, something like Salt Typhoon was inevitable, and will likely happen again unless significant changes are made...
DIRNSA Fired - Schneier on Security
In “Secrets and Lies” (2000), I wrote: It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state. It’s something a bunch of us were saying at the time, in reference to the vast NSA’s surveillance capabilities. I have been thinking of that quote a lot as I read news stories of President Trump firing the Director of the National Security Agency. General Timothy Haugh. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote: We don’t know what pressure the Trump administration is using to make intelligence services fall into line, but it isn’t crazy to ...
Web 3.0 Requires Data Integrity - Schneier on Security
If you’ve ever taken a computer security class, you’ve probably learned about the three legs of computer security—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—known as the CIA triad. When we talk about a system being secure, that’s what we’re referring to. All are important, but to different degrees in different contexts. In a world populated by artificial intelligence (AI) systems and artificial intelligent agents, integrity will be paramount. What is data integrity? It’s ensuring that no one can modify data—that’s the security angle—but it’s much more than that. It encompasses accuracy, completeness, and quality of data—all over both time and space. It’s preventing accidental data loss; the “undo” button is a primitive integrity measure. It’s also making sure that data is accurate when it’s collected—that it comes from a trustworthy source, that nothing important is missing, and that it doesn’t change as it moves from format to format. The ability to restart your computer is another integrity measure...
Rational Astrologies and Security - Schneier on Security
John Kelsey and I wrote a short paper for the Rossfest Festschrift: “Rational Astrologies and Security“: There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these fall into the category of what has been called rational astrology. First identified by Randy Steve Waldman [Wal12], the term refers to something people treat as though it works, generally for social or institutional reasons, even when there’s little evidence that it works—and sometimes despite substantial evidence that it does not...
Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings - Schneier on Security
I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones. Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can’t be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory defaults erase data, or is it still recoverable? That is, does the reset erase the old encryption key, or just sever the password that access that key? When the phone is rebooted, are deleted files still available? We need answers for both iPhones and Android phones. And it’s not just the US; the world is going to become a more dangerous place to oppose state power...
The Signal Chat Leak and the NSA - Schneier on Security
US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who started the now-infamous group chat coordinating a US attack against the Yemen-based Houthis on March 15, is seemingly now suggesting that the secure messaging service Signal has security vulnerabilities. "I didn’t see this loser in the group," Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. "Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out." Waltz’s implication that Goldberg may have hacked his way in was followed by a ...
AIs as Trusted Third Parties - Schneier on Security
This is a truly fascinating paper: “Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography.” The basic idea is that AIs can act as trusted third parties: Abstract: We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as achieving certain goals necessitates sharing private data. Traditionally, addressing this challenge has involved either seeking trusted intermediaries or constructing cryptographic protocols that restrict how much data is revealed, such as multi-party computations or zero-knowledge proofs. While significant advances have been made in scaling cryptographic approaches, they remain limited in terms of the size and complexity of applications they can be used for. In this paper, we argue that capable machine learning models can fulfill the role of a trusted third party, thus enabling secure computations for applications that were previously infeasible. In particular, we describe Trusted Capable Model Environments (TCMEs) as an alternative approach for scaling secure computation, where capable machine learning model(s) interact under input/output constraints, with explicit information flow control and explicit statelessness. This approach aims to achieve a balance between privacy and computational efficiency, enabling private inference where classical cryptographic solutions are currently infeasible. We describe a number of use cases that are enabled by TCME, and show that even some simple classic cryptographic problems can already be solved with TCME. Finally, we outline current limitations and discuss the path forward in implementing them...
AI Data Poisoning - Schneier on Security
Cloudflare has a new feature—available to free users as well—that uses AI to generate random pages to feed to AI web crawlers: Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler’s operators that they’ve been detected. “When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them,” writes Cloudflare. “But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.”...
Report on Paragon Spyware - Schneier on Security
Citizen Lab has a new report on Paragon’s spyware: Key Findings: Introducing Paragon Solutions. Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite. The company differentiates itself by claiming it has safeguards to prevent the kinds of spyware abuses that NSO Group and other vendors are notorious for. Infrastructure Analysis of Paragon Spyware. Based on a tip from a collaborator, we mapped out server infrastructure that we attribute to Paragon’s Graphite spyware tool. We identified a subset of suspected Paragon deployments, including in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore. ...
More Countries are Demanding Backdoors to Encrypted Apps - Schneier on Security
Last month, I wrote about the UK forcing Apple to break its Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud. More recently, both Sweden and France are contemplating mandating backdoors. Both initiatives are attempting to scare people into supporting backdoors, which are—of course—are terrible idea. Also: “A Feminist Argument Against Weakening Encryption.”
My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus - Schneier on Security
The Atlantic has a search tool that allows you to search for specific works in the “LibGen” database of copyrighted works that Meta used to train its AI models. (The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but not the search tool.) It’s impossible to know exactly which parts of LibGen Meta used to train its AI, and which parts it might have decided to exclude; this snapshot was taken in January 2025, after Meta is known to have accessed the database, so some titles here would not have been available to download. Still…interesting. Searching my name yields 199 results: all of my books in different versions, plus a bunch of shorter items...
Friday Squid Blogging: A New Explanation of Squid Camouflage - Schneier on Security
New research: An associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern University, Deravi’s recently published paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C sheds new light on how squid use organs that essentially function as organic solar cells to help power their camouflage abilities. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Critical GitHub Attack - Schneier on Security
This is serious: A sophisticated cascading supply chain attack has compromised multiple GitHub Actions, exposing critical CI/CD secrets across tens of thousands of repositories. The attack, which originally targeted the widely used “tj-actions/changed-files” utility, is now believed to have originated from an earlier breach of the “reviewdog/action-setup@v1” GitHub Action, according to a report. […] CISA confirmed the vulnerability has been patched in version 46.0.1. Given that the utility is used by more than 23,000 GitHub repositories, the scale of potential impact has raised significant alarm throughout the developer community...
Is Security Human Factors Research Skewed Towards Western Ideas and Habits? - Schneier on Security
Really interesting research: “How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research?” by Ayako A. Hasegawa Daisuke Inoue, and Mitsuaki Akiyama: Abstract: In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. This WEIRD skew may hinder understanding of diverse populations and their cultural differences. The usable privacy and security (UPS) field has inherited many research methodologies from research on human factor fields. We conducted a literature review to understand the extent to which participant samples in UPS papers were from WEIRD countries and the characteristics of the methodologies and research topics in each user study recruiting Western or non-Western participants. We found that the skew toward WEIRD countries in UPS is greater than that in HCI. Geographic and linguistic barriers in the study methods and recruitment methods may cause researchers to conduct user studies locally. In addition, many papers did not report participant demographics, which could hinder the replication of the reported studies, leading to low reproducibility. To improve geographic diversity, we provide the suggestions including facilitate replication studies, address geographic and linguistic issues of study/recruitment methods, and facilitate research on the topics for non-WEIRD populations...
Improvements in Brute Force Attacks - Schneier on Security
New paper: “GPU Assisted Brute Force Cryptanalysis of GPRS, GSM, RFID, and TETRA: Brute Force Cryptanalysis of KASUMI, SPECK, and TEA3.” Abstract: Key lengths in symmetric cryptography are determined with respect to the brute force attacks with current technology. While nowadays at least 128-bit keys are recommended, there are many standards and real-world applications that use shorter keys. In order to estimate the actual threat imposed by using those short keys, precise estimates for attacks are crucial. In this work we provide optimized implementations of several widely used algorithms on GPUs, leading to interesting insights on the cost of brute force attacks on several real-word applications...
Upcoming Speaking Engagements - Schneier on Security
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025. I’m speaking at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Canada, on April 3, 2025. The list is maintained on this page.
Friday Squid Blogging: SQUID Band - Schneier on Security
A bagpipe and drum band: SQUID transforms traditional Bagpipe and Drum Band entertainment into a multi-sensory rush of excitement, featuring high energy bagpipes, pop music influences and visually stunning percussion! As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
TP-Link Router Botnet - Schneier on Security
There is a new botnet that is infecting TP-Link routers: The botnet can lead to command injection which then makes remote code execution (RCE) possible so that the malware can spread itself across the internet automatically. This high severity security flaw (tracked as CVE-2023-1389) has also been used to spread other malware families as far back as April 2023 when it was used in the Mirai botnet malware attacks. The flaw also linked to the Condi and AndroxGh0st malware attacks. […] Of the thousands of infected devices, the majority of them are concentrated in Brazil, Poland, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria and Turkey; with the botnet targeting manufacturing, medical/healthcare, services and technology organizations in the United States, Australia, China and Mexico...
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea Intelligence Sharing - Schneier on Security
Former CISA Director Jen Easterly writes about a new international intelligence sharing co-op: Historically, China, Russia, Iran & North Korea have cooperated to some extent on military and intelligence matters, but differences in language, culture, politics & technological sophistication have hindered deeper collaboration, including in cyber. Shifting geopolitical dynamics, however, could drive these states toward a more formalized intell-sharing partnership. Such a “Four Eyes” alliance would be motivated by common adversaries and strategic interests, including an enhanced capacity to resist economic sanctions and support proxy conflicts...